Many English Renaissance texts offer readings of the Song of Songs, by both well-known authors, such as Shakespeare, and the long neglected (William Baldwin, Robert Aylett, Abiezer Coppe and Lawrence Clarkson). This new study looks at the different traditions they represent, and most notably the balance in the tension of the Song of Songs as oral and written, carnal and spiritual. The introduction presents a historical and theoretical discussion of Canticles, using a Rabbinic model for juxtaposing orality and textuality; the author goes on to argue that from the time of ancient Sumer through...

John Donne is here treated as an original religious thinker; the evidence for the distinguishing features of his theology is drawn primarily from his extant sermons studied in context, beginning with an exploration of what is for Donne the fundamental belief for regulating Christian faith and practice, the doctrine of the Trinity. Building on this theological groundwork, Johnson goes on to examine such topics as Donne's understanding of common prayer; the pre-eminence of sight and spectacle, in terms of religious self-fashioning and the iconoclastic controversy; the doctrine of repentance, in...

Although the question of Machiavellian influence on Shakespeare has been thoroughly debated, this book represents the first attempt to compare the two authors in detail. The playwright and the political philosopher share a common ground, a fascination with the motives and morality of political action, which makes for remarkable similarities in their presentation of the subject. In his deploying of the argument, the author of Il Principe emerges as a dramatic writer, like his English counterpart. The book, while taking in an obvious -Machiavel- figure such as Richard III, considers Machiavelli...

This book considers the professional contribution of John Donne to an emerging homiletic public sphere in the last years of the Jacobean English Church (1621-25), arguing that his sermons embody the conflicts, tensions, and pressures on public religious discourse in this period; while they are in no way -typical- of any particular preaching agenda or style, they articulate these crises in their most complex forms and expose fault lines in the late Jacobean Church. The study is framed by Donne's two most pointed contributions to the public sphere: his sermon defending James I's Directions to...

This book explores the complex ways in which authors, publishers, and readers contributed to the making of Restoration poetry. The essays in Part I map some principal aspects of Restoration poetic culture: how poetic canons were established through both print and manuscript; how censorship operated within the manuscript transmission of erotic and politically sensitive poems; the poetic functions of authorial anonymity; the work of allusion and intertextual reference; the translation and adaptation of classical poetry; and the poetic representations of Charles II. Part II turns to individual...

This book provides a radical reassessment of Spenserian allegory, in particular of The Faerie Queene, in the light of contemporary historical and theoretical interests in space and material culture. It explores the ambiguous and fluctuating attention to materiality, objects, and substance in the poetics of The Faerie Queene, and discusses the way that Spenser's creation of allegorical meaning makes use of this materiality, and transforms it. It suggests further that a critical engagement with materiality (which has been so important to the recent study of early modern drama) must come, in the...

Both English language and English political life underwent unprecedented change in the sixteenth century, creating acute linguistic and legal crises that, in Elizabeth I's later years, intersected in the pioneering poetry of Edmund Spenser. This volume explores Spenser's linguistic experimentation and his engagement with political, and particularly legal, thought and language in his major works, demonstrating by thorough lexical analysis and illustrative readings how Spenser figured the nation both descriptively and prescriptively. As a study of the language of The Faerie Queene, the book...

For nearly two decades, Renaissance literary scholarship has been dominated by various forms of postmodern criticism which claim to expose the simplistic methodology of traditional' criticism and to offer a more sophisticated view of the relation between literature and history; however, this new approach, although making scholars more alert to the political significance of literary texts, has been widely criticised on both methodological and theoretical grounds. The revisionist essays collected in this volume make a major contribution to the modern debate on historical method, approaching...

From the late-medieval period through to the seventeenth century, English theatrical clowns carried a weighty cultural significance, only to have it stripped from them, sometimes violently, by the close of the Renaissance when the famed "license" of fooling was effectively revoked. This groundbreaking survey of clown traditions in the period looks both at their history, and reveals their hidden cultural contexts and legacies; it has far-reaching implications not only for our general understanding of English clown types, but also their considerable role in defining social, religious and racial...

-Full of fresh and illuminating insights into a way of looking at the English past in the sixteenth century... a book with the potential to deepen and transform our understanding of Tudor attitudes to ethnic identity and the national past.- Philip Schwyzer, University of Exeter. Laurence Nowell (1530-c.1570), author of the first dictionary of Old English, and William Lambarde (1536-1601), Nowell's protege and eventually the first editor of the Old English Laws, are key figures in Elizabethan historical discourses and in its political and literary society; through their work the period between...